scholarly journals The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Attention

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

scholarly journals The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Attention

AbstractBased on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Liarou
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Population ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Written Sources

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.

Who Framed Theatre? The ‘Moment of Change’ in British TV Drama

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh ◽  
Stephen Lacey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The University

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.

Metaphors for Nation and War in Chinua Achebe's Memoir

2016 ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Onwu Inya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor Theory ◽  
Dysfunctional Family ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nigerian Civil War

Chinua Achebe's memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, caused quite a stir in the Nigerian polity when it was published in 2012. This chapter, therefore, examined the metaphors used by the author to construe the concepts of nation and the (Nigerian civil) war in the memoir. Theoretical insights were drawn from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Primary metaphor theory and Conceptual blending theory to analyze the metaphors identified. Two central metaphors were used by the author to construe the concept of nation, namely, the DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY and the SCAPEGOAT metaphors. Metaphors for war included WAR AS NIGHTMARE, AS A TRIANGLE GAME, and AS A SERIES OF VIOLENT CRIMES respectively. The metaphor system highlighted in this chapter indicates that bad governance, corruption and ethnic politics were critical to the failure of Nigeria's first democratic experience (1960-1966) and the resultant civil war of 1967-1970.

Prodigals and Profligates; or, a Short History of Modern British Drama

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-38
Author(s):  
John Stokes
Keyword(s):  
British Literature ◽  
Short History ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
King's College ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern British Literature

In 1996 John Stokes was appointed to the first endowed Chair in Modern British Literature at King's College, London, where English has been taught since the 1830s. In this version of his inaugural lecture, delivered on 6 November 1997, he traces the transformations undergone by the figure of the prodigal son in the drama of the last hundred years and argues for recognition of the part played by actors in determining the course of theatrical history.

Shakespeare, Virgil and the First Hamlet

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 113-129
Author(s):  
John V. Nance
Keyword(s):  
Critical History ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Evidence

Of the fifteen verbal links Wiggins associates with Q1 Hamlet in his catalogue of British Drama, the inclusion of Dido, Queen of Carthage is potentially the most problematic in terms of establishing a 1588–1589 date for the play. This article re-examines the editorial and critical history of the most commonly cited overlap between these two plays – the entirety of ‘Aeneas’s tale to Dido’ – and it provides new evidence that challenges their continued association.

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